Political robocall wakes up residents at 2 a.m.

DECATUR, Ga. -- Robocalls. Like them or not, they've become a part of the political campaign process. No one expects to receive them at 2 a.m., but early Sunday morning,11Alive News started getting emails from viewers saying that's exactly what happened.

"The phone rings at 2:32 this morning, the first thing I think of is there's been a family emergency, some sort of crisis," said William Wells, whosewife and two teenage children were out of the house Saturday night.

The calls were for Jerome Edmondson, a candidate for Dekalb County CEO.Wellsisa Cobb county resident, making the call even more odd, considering he can't even vote in the race.

"It was pretty frustrating because of late the phone rings five, six, seven times a day with political messages anyway," Wells said. "So it's bad enough all day, and now to get one in the middle of the night? I was not able to go back to sleep right away."

Even Dekalb residents who could vote in the election were upset to get the message in the middle of the night.

"I'm on all the Do Not Call lists but somehow they evade that list," said Jim Spernyak. "They're frustrating, they're annoying, they're intrusive."

Edmondson says he's just as baffled as the people who received the calls.He spent Sunday afternoon trying to personally apologize to the people who had called or emailed his campaign office to complain.

"This is not the way you want to communicate with your constituents in DeKalb county," Edmondson said.

Edmondson says his campaign ordered the robocalls to go out Thursday and Friday night from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. He did not order any calls over the weekend. He's contacted the vendor to find out why it happened and who made the calls.

Edmondson says he hired a local firm to do the work, but the residents who received the calls say they came from a toll free number, as well as an area code in California.

"It's caused us to dig a little bit deeper into this process, how did it happen?" Edmondson told 11Alive. "The mechanics that go into making these calls.There are some tough questions that we need to ask the companies that we outsource these processes too."

Edmondson says he'll stop doing business with the company until he gets answers.